I heard him hurry off; and it seemed an hour before he came back, while I sat listening to a terrible moaning, and smelling the spilt sherry and the oily knocked-out lamp. Then Sir John came in, quite pale, but looking full of fight, and the first thing he did was to stoop down over Edward Gunning and take a pistol from his breast. “You take that, Burdon,” he said, “and use it if we are attacked.”
“Which we shan’t be, Sir John, if you help me to get this stone back in its place.”
He set the lamp on one of the chests and lent a hand, when the stone dropped tightly into its place; and we dragged a couple of chests across, side by side, before turning to young Mr Barclay, who lay there on his side as if asleep.
“Now,” says Sir John, as he laid his hand upon the young man’s collar and dragged him over on to his back, “I think we had better hand this fellow over to the police.”
“The doctor, you mean, sir. Look at him.”
I needn’t have bade him look, for Sir John was already doing that.
It was a doctor that I fetched, and not the police, for Mr Barclay lay there quite insensible, and smelling as if he had taken to eating opium, while Ned Gunning had so awful a cut across his temple that he would soon have bled to death.
The doctor came and dressed the rascal’s wounds as he was laid in my pantry; but he shook his head over Mr Barclay, and with reason; for two months had passed away before we got him down to Dorking, and saw his pale face beginning to get something like what it was, with Miss Virginia, forgiving and gentle, always by his side.
But I’m taking a very big jump, and saying nothing about our going across to the house opposite as soon as it was daylight, to find the door open and no one there; while the state of that basement and what we saw there, and the artfulness of the people, and the labour they had given in driving that passage right under the road as true as a die, filled me with horror, and cost Sir John five hundred pounds.
Why, their measurements and calculations were as true as true; and if it hadn’t been for me missing that paper—which, of course, it was Edward Gunning who stole it—those scoundrels would have carried off that golden incubus as sure as we were alive. But they didn’t get it; and they had gone off scot-free, all but our late footman, who had concussion of the brain in the hospital where he was took, Sir John saying that he would let the poor wretch get well before he handed him over to the police.